This also depends so much on your scaling needs. If you need 3 mid-sized ECS/EC2 instances, a load balancer, and a database with backups, renting those from AWS isn’t going to be significantly more expensive for a decent-sized company than hiring someone to manage a cluster for you and dealing with all the overhead of keeping it maintained and secure.
If you’re at the scale of hundreds of instances, that math changes significantly.
And a lot of it depends on what type of business you have and what percent of your budget hosting accounts for.
I also thinks it’s risk model too. Every time I see these kind of posts I think it misses the point there is a balance not only on cost like you describe but risk as well. You are paying to offload some of the risk from yourself.
> You are paying to offload some of the risk from yourself.
The opposite is also true: one is risking being banned by exascalers.
The issue is that they have already paid off their datacenter 5x over compared to cloud. For offline, batch training, I don't ses how any amount of risk could offset the savings.
It’s no issue and it’s right in the front for their situation, if your business is computer it makes little sense for cloud.
That said from the risk perspective I assume for what their doing in the data center there is low risk if downtime happens.